This puzzle:

Mary Lou Guizzo notes: One of my favorite NYT crossword puzzle constructors is Elizabeth Gorski. Her August 18, 2013 puzzle, EDGINESS, planted the seed for this along with another puzzle published in the WSJ (March 7, 2014, ... more

Mary Lou Guizzo notes: One of my favorite NYT crossword puzzle constructors is Elizabeth Gorski. Her August 18, 2013 puzzle, EDGINESS, planted the seed for this along with another puzzle published in the WSJ (March 7, 2014, co-constructed with Jeff Chen). I remember being intrigued by Ms. Gorski's crossword. Reinforcement came after seeing Dan Schoenholz's CONFUSION puzzle in the NYT on December 5, 2013.

Once I'd decided on DOUBLE-EDGED as the revealer, the next step was to jot down words shared/paired with DOUBLE. After compiling this list, I chose to use perimeter words that were preceded, rather than followed by DOUBLE. Once the perimeter was in place, I followed Jeff's advice to fill the outside first, working my way inward. (He's been AROUND and knows — see his February 23, 2012 NYT puzzle). I really had to DOUBLE down!

I have to laugh now as I'm rereading what Ms. Gorski penned at xwordinfo.com:

Obviously, I didn't take that good advice — I was working on not just one, but two of these type puzzles.

Ms. Gorski was correct though, at times I thought I was becoming a "borderline case" trying to fill this puzzle cleanly. The only theme related material I had in the center of this grid was the revealer, unlike her puzzle which had the added phrase, AROUND THE PERIMETER (split), in addition to her revealer. My hat is off to you, Ms. Gorski! Thanks not only for the many pleasurable hours of solving delightful puzzles that you have given me, but also for being the inspiration for this and the WSJ puzzle.

I would like to encourage more females to try their hand at constructing and to consider getting into the sciences and math. Unknown to some, it was a young woman, Rosalind Franklin, whose research led to the discovery of the structure of the DOUBLE HELIX of DNA. Unfortunately, she died in 1958, at a young age, and was therefore ineligible for nomination for the Nobel Prize in 1962 which was subsequently awarded to Crick, Watson, and Wilkins in that year.

I hope you enjoyed the DOUBLE feature. (I know, I know, enough DOUBLE talk!) Thanks to Will Shortz for accepting and editing this puzzle. I am thrilled to get a Sunday puzzle in the NYT.

Jeff Chen notes: Mary Lou, back with her second NYT in a month! I enjoyed this one, which featured (DOUBLE) ___ type themers, like a (DOUBLE) BARRELED shotgun and a (DOUBLE) AGENT, all tied together with a DOUBLE EDGED revealer ... more

Jeff Chen notes: Mary Lou, back with her second NYT in a month! I enjoyed this one, which featured (DOUBLE) ___ type themers, like a (DOUBLE) BARRELED shotgun and a (DOUBLE) AGENT, all tied together with a DOUBLE EDGED revealer hinting to the perimeter theme answers. Tight theme, nice.

As with all perimeter theme-type puzzles, fill can be quite tricky. Mary Lou and I have tackled a couple of these constructions together, and there's hardly ever zero compromises. She does well in creating her grid skeleton, which spreads around the white space pretty evenly. If you stand back and squint, not a single white space jumps out at you as bigger than the others, and that's generally what you want. One big space can slaughter you with its intense difficulty to fill.

Lovely selection of longer fill. TITLE ROLES, DEBUT ALBUM, OLIVER STONE, CLEAR THE AIR, yes yes yes yes! That's the way to pick snappy answers. Since the themers are all pretty short, the grid must contain some longer fill (due to the word count maximum) so it's super important to make good use of these spaces. Mary Lou does well here.

Ah, the difficulty of filling these bad boys. Corners like the NW and SE are always going to be tough, playing out like filling a themeless puzzle. The NW is pretty decent, only OEN, SLO, ELL, ERICAS as slight blights. The SW has some more issues, PERCALES being an oddity. When I searched it on Bing, the first answer that came up was the Wikipedia article on Pericles. Now, that may have more to do with Bing than anything, but it felt to me at best a missed opportunity to do something with that nice 8-letter entry slot. And man, is it going to be tough for people unfamiliar with SARAPES.

Sections like the west and east are typically easier to fill since there's not much constraining them like in the four corners, but since Mary Lou has long answers crossing them (TITLE ROLES and DEBUT ALBUM), things get hairy. AREEL, ESSE, and especially TELA create a bit of inelegance, as do CESTA, A HAT, SNEE. Perimeter puzzles are super tricky. Starting in the middle often creates problems in propagating fill out into the corners, and staring in the corners often creates problems in knitting the sections together.

Finally, some great stuff. [Better at picking things up?] wasn't pointing to SMARTER or anything, but TIDIER. And I love to see a clever clue for a shorty like SOD: [Cover some ground?] adds a lot of spice. Stuff like this really adds to my overall impressions of any puzzle.

Congrats on your Sunday NYT debut, Mary Lou! Interesting to see that in 2013, only eleven of the NYT Sunday puzzles were made by women (the awesome Liz Gorski had six of those). Glad to see Mary Lou join the club of Sunday constructors. As I've offered before, if you're a woman interested in working on a Sunday NYT puzzle submission and could use a hand or just some feedback, let's talk. If I can't help you, I'm sure we can find you someone that can. Let's do what we can to even up the stats, yeah? Contact me through the XWord Info home page.

JimH notes: 2013 was a step up from the previous year when there were only seven Sundays by women.